Quien Es Mas Macho?

Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke?

How do you kill a man with a single piece of paper? To be honest, I have no idea. But twenty years ago, when I was a junior in college, I tore through Trevanian's thriller Shibumi in hope of finding out how its hero--one of those coolly capable international "operatives" who populate so many of the best-sellers that some women I know call "guy books" (and the publishing industry calls "male genre fiction")--dispatched five terrorists in an airplane lavatory using nothing more than an ID card. I never did find out how, but after I finished Shibumi, my roommates started to notice odd changes in me: the rice-and-seaweed-only diet; the monk-like abstinence from alcohol (very peculiar for UVa in 1980); and the cross-legged meditation sessions in my dorm room. They thought my search for purity was a sign that I was going Krishna; how could they have guessed that I was secretly emulating a fictional character whose Zen self-sufficiency was so total that--I continue to puzzle over this one, too--he could achieve orgasm through concentration alone?

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

My experimentation with self-abnegation was short-lived, but the Shibumi experience left me hooked on those unabashedly formulaic murder mysteries and violent thrillers that run their improbably softhearted tough-guy heroes through narrative clockworks intricate enough to give the entire country of Switzerland a run for its francs. This month, a crop of new offerings by masters of the genre--Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Andrew Vachss, and James Patterson--may offer some insights about why these books appeal so much to men.

Most Popular

On the face of it, there's little about these novels' Marvel Comics heroes or their noirish plots that the suburban orthodontists or downtown suits (or book critics) who devour them can readily identify with. The protagonists of Patterson's Roses Are Red and Burke's Purple Cane Road are hard-bitten, down-and-out lawmen with ugly secrets in their pasts; Leonard's Father Terry Dunn is a missionary in Rwanda with a one-armed Tutsi mistress and a suspicious expertise with high-end firearms; and Vachss's character Burke, whose first name has apparently gone the way of most of his face (which has had an unfortunate run-in with some ordnance), is a hard-boiled ex-con whose constant weeping for a dead female named Pansy might soften your opinion of him if you didn't learn that Pansy was his attack dog. These characters are quite self-consciously literary creations; they talk as if they'd taken high school English from Sam Spade. "Unless you've had your own ticket punched in the Garden of Gethsemane," Dave Robicheaux, the Cajun hero of Purple Cane Road spits out, "you shouldn't judge those whose fate it is to visit there." I wish to God I talked like that. Then again, I wish to God I knew what it meant.

The plots won't strike cozily familiar chords, either. Patterson's Alex Cross is engaged in--what else?--a deadly battle of wits with an evil criminal mastermind called--what else?--the Mastermind. Robicheaux is tracking down his mother's murderers (a bunch of corrupt New Orleans cops) while trying to keep a well-mannered, pompadour-sporting sociopath away from his daughter. Father Dunn shoots his way out of the thick of the Rwandan genocide and heads back to the States, where he scams a quarter of a million dollars from a pious mafioso and an ex-con stand-up comedian named Debbie. And in Vachss's novel of implacable revenge ("The IVs fed me. But it was hate that gave me strength."), the hero hunts down the millionaire pedophile who set him up for assassination--and, more important, who sent Pansy to that great fire hydrant in the sky.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The writing is a lot better than most people give these authors credit for--although I'm not sure that's what got us hooked, either. As usual, Leonard's novel, Pagan Babies, with its crisp minimalist dialogue and seventeen-jewel plotting, is the best of the four. Patterson's is the most formulaic--it has "airport waiting lounge" written all over it. Louisiana-based Burke once again offers surprising levels of emotional nuance and some really rich, moody writing. (His Southern roots are showing.) Vachss's righteous indignation about child abuse sometimes competes with his prose. He barely tries to assemble the pieces for you; instead he juxtaposes discreet miniscenes and brief exchanges on the page , leaving it to his reader to put it all together.

"PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER" is the key. It's something all four heroes spend their time doing. Or maybe it's not putting it together. "Somehow it's all tied in together," Robicheaux mutters in frustration at one point in Purple Cane Road. "I just don't know how." Vachss's Burke grumbles, "I couldn't imagine any connection." Putting it together: As I looked at the chunks of dialogue and short bursts of description lined up on the page s of these books and tried to figure out how they all tied together, what the connections were--and trusting that everything did tie together, even if I wasn't sure I'd be able to do the tying myself--I was reminded of something from my boyhood that I couldn't put my finger on. Halfway through Vachss's Dead and Gone, I realized what it was: model-airplane instructions.

It was then that I saw how the pleasure of working through these novels, with their fill-in-the-blank characterizations and by-the-numbers plotting, was like the familiar preadolescent boy's pleasure in putting things together. It's a pleasure that males of the species are conditioned early on to seek out and enjoy: models, erector sets, puzzles, you name it. Think of it as training for the lives that we're told we're going to lead--lives in which we're the responsible ones, the ones who have to make the connections, figure things out, assemble things for ourselves. With their mysteries to be solved and moral and narrative confusions to be cleared up and disposed of, books like Leonard's and Vachss's allow us to do--but in a pressure-free fictionalized setting--what we've been told to do, and what we've been doing, all of our lives. The little satisfied click you feel at the end of these novels, when you finally figure out who the killer/terrorist/con artist is, is exactly the same feeling you had when the last piece of your model F-16 snapped into place.

Women, of course, have to figure things out, too, so why are these books guy books? Take a look at the heroes, with their crusty, superbly able exteriors barely concealing their soft, chewy centers. These four new novels have the same visceral appeal for grown men that the Harry Potter books have for twelve-year-olds: They're all about boys with extraordinary powers and secret hurts. (Like the heroes of many children's tales, the protagonists of these fictions are alone in the world: orphaned like Burke and Robicheaux or totally distanced from a sole, oblivious parent, like Leonard's Terry Dunn. The career criminal Burke had to grow up in a horrible foster home, just as Harry P. did.) Robicheaux, Dunn, Burke, and Cross may be unusually clever with clues or savvy about the arcana of violence, such as knowing how to handle fancy guns or where the precise location of the "nerve clusters, pressure points, arterial junctions" you press in order to immobilize a man are, but when you get down to it, the anxieties that plague them are the standard little-boy ones.

Hence the feelings of parental abandonment (the criminal "family" the orphaned Burke belongs to calls itself Children of the Secret--shades of Oliver Twist); the sense of powerlessness against the inexplicable cruelties of the world (the murder of Robicheaux's mother when he was a kid; the massacre of Father Dunn's parishioners in his church during mass); and the secret, shaming inadequacies at home (Dunn has to lie about who he really is; Burke is occasionally impotent; Cross can't save his daughter from a mystery illness).

It's true that there are some entertaining female characters here--Robicheaux's smart, moody wife; Dunn's mildly dishonest partner in crime (and bed)--but the women in these novels are, like the females in so many adolescent male fantasies, merely accessories: not to crime but to masculine self-image--and self-delusion. ("Real women don't see with their eyes," Dead and Gone's Burke drawls in his best Bogie manner. Wanna bet?) Ultimately, the female characters here are just around to tell us things about the men: that they know a good woman when they see one, say, or that they don't get hoodwinked by good sex with bad girls. These novels reflect and explore very primitive guy issues: every boy's hidden fears about what he can do, and who he is. It's no accident that the climactic sentences in both Vachss's and Burke's novels are about reunions with parents, or that in each book, virtually the last word is son.

However deeply we may bury boyhood anxieties, they persist into adulthood. Whatever you do for a living, you probably have to be tough now and then--fire someone, say--or pretend to knowledge you don't yet have; but you know--you have to believe--that on the inside you're the same vulnerable kid you've always been, the one who may have been afraid he wouldn't get picked for the team or who couldn't get his parents' attention. Gruff, capable, tender, hardheaded, with a soft spot for the downtrodden: That's as close as you can get to our secret, enduring ideal of what it means to be an American male. Despite their exotic plots and characters, the novels that constitute "male genre fiction" are so popular among us men because they're about us men. How much difference is there in the end between those of us who push paper for a living and the man who uses it to kill?